"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Democrat presidential candidates shamelessly pandered to the advocates of sodomy in a televised town hall Thursday on CNN, and Joe Biden did not ingratiate himself with the Left when he joked about “coming out” and then made a gaffe that’s weird even by Biden’s standards:

Think about it. The idea it’s normal. It’s normalized. It’s not anything strange. It’s not strange. That’s the generic point.
And the more people know that, the more they understand it — remember, Anderson, back 15, 20 years ago, we talked about this in — in San Francisco was all about, well, you know, gay — gay bath houses. And everybody — it’s all about around-the-clock sex. It’s all — come on, man. Gay couples are more likely to say together longer than heterosexual couples.

Notice the disorganized syntax, the word-salad quality of what Biden said. He had been headed toward making a “generic point” about homosexuality being “normalized,” something people must be encouraged to understand, when suddenly another thought popped into his head. Biden seems to have wished to make a point about “progress” in terms of societal acceptance of homosexuality. Therefore, Biden invoked an earlier time “15, 20 years ago” (which if taken literally would mean circa 1999-2004) when anti-gay prejudice was based on perceptions of widespread promiscuity — “gay bath houses . . . around-the-clock sex.” Or at least, that seems to be what Biden was trying to suggest.

Try to speak in complete sentences, Joe. Finish whatever argument you’re making before interrupting yourself to share some new idea that just popped into your senile mind. His “gay bath house” non sequitur was called “weird” and “bizarre,” and CNN’s town hall was panned as “disastrous” by John McCormack of National Review, but it’s important to note what was truly obnoxious in what Biden said Thursday.

His “generic point” was that anyone who disapproves of homosexuality, or opposes any policy agenda favored by the organized gay-rights lobby, must be motivated by ignorance, and in need of enlightenment. Yet disagreement on this subject does not reflect a difference of knowledge, but rather different systems of moral values. One could have a vast knowledge about homosexual behavior — indeed, one might have extensive direct personal experience with the phenomenon — without believing such behavior should be “normalized.”

It is a fact that there are many people who, in their own inclinations and appetites, are perhaps as gay as Anderson Cooper, but don’t align themselves with the LGBT political movement and its policy goals. Pay close attention to what Biden said Thursday:

The generic point I’m making here is, folks, the vast majority of people in America are not homophobic. They’re just afraid. They don’t understand. They don’t know. They don’t know what to do or say. . . .
If you had a business lunch eight, ten years ago, and there were six or seven people at the lunch, and a gay waiter came up and said something that identified himself being gay, in fact, if one of the people made fun of that waiter, the vast majority of people wouldn’t have said anything at the table. Today you’d all look at him and say, if you’re straight as can be, look at him and say, what the hell is the matter with you? And he’d never be invited back.
The point is, they’re not afraid now to stand up and say — because guess what? We learn.

Again, the adjectives “weird” and “bizarre” are appropriate. Biden is speaking of a time “eight, ten years ago” — i.e., 2009-2011 — when no one at a “business lunch” would have objected if someone made a joke at the expense of a gay waiter. Well, I don’t know, if he was an obvious mincing fairy, maybe someone would have said something, but . . .

What? No, I’m just pointing out the absurdity of Biden’s rhetoric, which involves a few different unstated premises:

The idea that a valid metric of “homophobia” is whether someone makes jokes about gay people; I make jokes about all kinds of people, and it doesn’t mean I hate any of them;

The attribution of universal victimhood to gay people, who we are supposed to believe are so emotionally vulnerable that they are irreparably harmed by jokes;
and

The idea that “the vast majority of people in America” are “just afraid” because they “don’t understand” — they are ignorant, and must “learn” whatever it is that cures homophobia.

These are the beliefs Biden was attempting to express in his incoherent gibberish, and the premises of his argument (which are widely held by liberals) simply cannot withstand objective scrutiny. As with every other issue, Democrats are promoting in regard to gay people what Thomas Sowell described as The Vision of the Anointed, the idea that every public-policy dispute involves a contest between the Enlightened Few and the Benighted Many. Liberals consider themselves to be morally and intellectually superior to such an extent that the rest of us are in need of their tutelage. Whatever the issue — high-speed rail in California or “Drag Queen Story Hour” at your local library — liberals think of their opponents as intellectually inferior to themselves, so that your opinion is wrong, and you are a bad person, if you disagree with a liberal.

At the CNN LGBT town hall on Thursday, former Vice President Joe Biden advocated for a kind of terror watchlist to monitor organizations that oppose same-sex marriage and transgender identity, similar to a previous Obama administration effort targeting conservatives groups. This monitoring echoed the Southern Poverty Law Center’s accusations that mainstream conservative Christian organizations are “anti-LGBT hate groups” on par with the Ku Klux Klan. . . .
“What we had before to deal with hate crimes was we had a position in our administration, within both the Department of Justice as well as within Homeland Security, a provision to keep watch on these groups that we know are out there — like terrorist groups, they’re similar — that we know are out there, to be able to follow — without violating their First Amendment rights — to be able to follow what they’re doing and follow up on threats that come forward,” Biden said.
While it remains unclear specifically to what Biden was referring, it seems likely this effort has something to do with a DHS report about “Rightwing Extremism,” which presented a broad swath of conservative groups as “hate-oriented.”
When mentioned in the context of LGBT issues, Biden’s call for monitoring groups “similar to terrorist groups” echoes the talking points of the SPLC, which has demonized conservative Christian organizations like Alliance Defending Freedom (a law firm that has won many Supreme Court cases), D. James Kennedy Ministries (cut off from Amazon’s charity program thanks to the SPLC), and the Family Research Council (which faced an active shooter thanks to the SPLC’s accusations). Conservatives targeted by the SPLC have lost access to their credit cards. Their organizations have been banned by sites like GoFundMe and Eventbrite, and even booted from Mar-a-Lago.

Again, we can only understand what’s wrong with this approach by extracting from Biden’s remarks his unstated premises. Biden implies that “hate crimes” against homosexuals are somehow inspired by the kind of “terrorist groups” the Obama administration made it a policy to “watch.” Good luck finding any evidence to support that belief.

There is no demonstrable cause-and-effect relationship between the activism of social conservative groups like FRC and the “hate crimes” perpetrated against members of the LGBT community. Biden is expressing a media-generated mythology about a “climate of hate”:

For example, in June 2017, it was reported that 17-year-old Rayquann Deonte Jernigan, a/k/a “Ava Le’Ray Barrin,” had become the “Youngest Trans Murder Victim In The U.S. This Year.” Was this murder caused by a Trump-inspired “climate of hate”? No, according to police in Athens, Georgia, this fatal shooting was “the culmination of a feud between two transgender groups.” A judge dismissed a murder charge against the accused shooter, ruling that Jalen Breon Brown, 21, acted in self-defense during a fight with Jernigan. Or what about the March 2018 murder of Darrel “Amia Tyrae” Berryman in Louisiana? The Human Rights Campaign reported that Berryman, “a transgender woman of color,” had become “the seventh known homicide of a transgender person this year.” Was Berryman killed by a Republican voter? No, the police charged Dedrick Butler, a 22-year-old convicted felon, with murdering Berryman in a $55-a-night East Baton Rouge motel room where “Amia Tyrae” was working as a prostitute.

Pretty sure these perps weren’t on the FRC mailing list.

Oh, and since Joe Biden raised the subject let’s talk about round-the-clock sex in gay bath houses. The era to which Biden refers was the late 1970s and early ’80s (not “15, 20 years ago”), a climate of rampant homosexual promiscuity that gave rise to the AIDS epidemic.

In 1982, the CDC reported that that the “median number of lifetime male sexual partners” for gay men diagnosed with AIDS was 1,160. In other words, a majority of the first men diagnosed with this sexually transmitted disease had more than one thousand partners. The man known as “Patient Zero” of the AIDS epidemic, Gaetan Dugas, estimated that he had sex with 2,500 men from 1972 to 1982, i.e., 250 different partners every year for 10 consecutive years. We may stipulate that Dugas was an extreme example, but his behavior was the tip of a very large iceberg of gay promiscuity during the Disco Era. But oh, you’re just an ignorant bigot if you disapprove of such behavior.

Comments

[…] Again, the adjectives “weird” and “bizarre” are appropriate. Biden is speaking of a time “eight, ten years ago” — i.e., 2009-2011 — when no one at a “business lunch” would have objected if someone made a joke at the expense of a gay waiter. Well, I don’t know, if he was an obvious mincing fairy, maybe someone would have said something, but . . . […]

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